Desperate for work, lured into danger

The journey of a dozen impoverished men from Nepal to Iraq reveals the exploitation underpinning the American war effort

October 09, 2005|By Cam Simpson Tribune correspondent

KATMANDU, Nepal — The jolting news out of Iraq came to the woman from a neighbor boy.

"What's your son's name?" the child cried out, his voice ringing through their village in the Himalayan foothills, almost 4,000 miles from the American theater of war.

"Bishnu Hari Thapa," the woman called back.

"Turn on your television," the boy shouted.

Peering at the small screen in her family's apartment, Bishnu Maya Thapa saw the solemn face of her firstborn son. Worried for three weeks, ever since he'd left an alarming phone message, she now saw him posed before a black banner emblazoned with Arabic, holding his passport open with his right hand, just below his chin.

Someone beyond the frame's edge held a rifle's muzzle over Bishnu Hari's head. Alongside him stood 11 other Nepalis, as if gathered for some kind of class photo. The 12 men had been seized by terrorists in Iraq, the announcer said, the words robbing the mother of her breath.

It had been only seven weeks since she sent her 18-year-old son off to earn a paycheck that would bring their family a better life. But that paycheck was supposed to come from the safety of a five-star hotel in Jordan, not the combat zone of Iraq.

Whether Bishnu Hari and most of the other 11 Nepalis even knew before leaving home that they were headed to Iraq remains a mystery.

At least three did, but they were deceived about key details. Most of the rest, including Bishnu Hari, appear to have been lured with fraudulent paperwork promising jobs at the luxury hotel in Amman.

They learned Iraq was their real destination only after their families went deeply into debt to pay huge sums demanded by the brokers who sent these sons and brothers to the Middle East.

The stench of grease, scorched cumin and sweat coats the brown thatch walls of the New Bamboo Cottage, a Tiki-hut restaurant on the edge of Katmandu, Nepal's sprawling capital.

In the early summer of 2004, Bishnu Hari worked odd jobs around the restaurant. At night, he would sleep on the pale linoleum tables shoved together, side-by-side and end-to-end, after the restaurant's final customer had gone home.

He was 5 feet tall and wore bluejeans and sandals. His face often sported fuzz that wouldn't trouble a razor. But in Nepalese society he was already a man, expected to help his family. That was why his mother, like so many here, had prayed for a son.

For Bishnu Hari, sleeping on the restaurant's tables was about finding a chance to improve the lot of a mother who earlier in her life had crushed stones at a quarry for pennies a day. It was about helping a father shouldering the burdens of rent, food and clothing for a family of five.

In Bishnu Hari's hometown of Siudibar, a rural village named for a wildflower, there are few opportunities beyond subsistence farming. But he was trained as a welder and electrician, giving him the skill to fix the wiring rigged all around the New Bamboo Cottage. In return, the owner let him stay there for free.

Being close to Katmandu was his real reward: Bishnu Hari dreamed of getting a job in another country with help from one of the city's more than 400 manpower agencies.

For a fee, often 10 times more than Nepal's per capita income of $270 a year, those agencies send men to labor in the Persian Gulf region, Malaysia and beyond. While onerous, the fee is a gamble that any job in the Middle East might yield a salary of $200 a month, an unimaginable sum in Nepal.

Tourism, once buoyed by Westerners in search of Shangri-La, was an early casualty of Nepal's 9-year-old civil war with Maoist rebels. Almost 40 percent of the country's nearly 28 million people live on less than $1 a day.

So the estimated $1 billion wired home each year by overseas Nepalis outpaces tourism, all exports and foreign aid combined.

Many from Bishnu Hari's remote village, in a district ravaged by the Maoist war, had made the five-hour bus ride to Katmandu before him, following the same dream.

Meeting the middleman

Kumar Thapa, a former neighbor from Bishnu Hari's village, was living in Katmandu. During a visit back home, he had offered to help the young man.

Thapa is what Nepalis call a dalal, which is a Hindi-derived word once used to identify a pimp. Now it's synonymous with "middleman" or "agent." Dalals are vital to the overseas labor system. They don't have licenses. They only take cash. There are no receipts. Nothing is written down.

Thapa was an amateur in this world, but he earned the dalal's reward. He pocketed a fee for each man he sent to the labor agents. And he hoped for another commission, helping get Bishnu Hari into the New Bamboo Cottage and close to the action.

After sleeping on the restaurant's dining tables for three weeks, Bishnu Hari found an advertisement in the June 13, 2004, edition of the Kantipur Daily, the leading Nepalese-language newspaper.

In the bottom corner of Page 16, it read: "Vacancies in Amman, Jordan."